September 15, 2017
By
Law Offices of James E. Crawford, Jr. & Associates

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The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that doing a cheek swab for DNA is just
like fingerprinting and photographing during the booking procedure after
a person has been arrested.

Thus, police now have the go-ahead to swab your cheek for DNA and match
that DNA to records in the criminal database. It’s like an updated
form of fingerprinting. As Richard Wolf reports for USA Today, this case
was a “classic test between modern crime-fighting technology and
centuries-old privacy rights.”

And modern crime-fighting technology won out.

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, as you’d expect, dissented with
the Supreme Court’s ruling, arguing that this result crosses the
line into an unreasonable police search.

Wolf quotes Scalia’s dissent: “Make no mistake about it: because
of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national
database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever
reason.”

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